Have you examined your company’s ethics policy recently? The protocols mentioned in the company’s ethics policy should always be up-to-date. Fail to do that will create opportunities for employees to behave ignorantly and unethically. Ethics policy in your company helps employees to make decisions as per the organization’s ethical values and standards, also reduce the chances of financial risk, reputational damage due to negligence.
Ethics Policy
There are certain points you need to be included while you write or revise your company’s ethics policy. For the betterment of the organization, following the ethics policy by every employee is indispensable. There are certain points that should be part of the company's ethics policy. Conflicts of Interest, Gifts and Entertainment, Reporting ethics violation, and Anti-retaliation policy.
Conflicts of Interest
Regardless of the type of the industry or size of the company Conflict of Interest can be tricky for anyone. For instance, you don’t want to hire only family members of existing employees, but should a candidate be rejected only because he is related to the manager? Or what if an employee doing side business, where they do similar work as at your company, but for a different industry? To make sure that the company addresses conflicts of interest as a serious scenario, it is essential to include them as a section in the company ethics policy.
Different Types of Conflict of Interests is:
- Financial conflict of Interest
- Non-financial conflict of interest
- Advertising and marketing
- Conflict of roles
- Influence
- Outside interest
- Confidential information
- Banking and more
Do not forget to include any conflict of interest which is relevant to your industry, so that employees do not need to get confused in any situation.
Gifts and Entertainment
Gifts and entertainment have to be included as a part of your company’s ethics policy if it has a large part in your business. In case your company has a detailed protocol regarding this subject, it is necessary to write a separate policy section and need to direct employees regarding this matter.
The main three principles that can be considered as company’s position on gifts and entertainment are:
- Gifts or entertainment received by anyone should not influence the decisions on how the organization’s business format.
- Never make personal benefit from company business with suppliers or others or receive personal gain from transactions made on behalf of the company.
- Expenses by suppliers should be limited and applied to reduce the cost of goods or expenses for the benefit of customers and shareholders.
The main reason behind providing gifts and entertainment ethics policy is to provide additional guidance and procedure to business associates or partners.
Reporting Ethics Violation
A well-explained ethics policy prevents employees from doing ethical failures. Still, there will be few people who commit mistakes or takes poor decisions. Most of them commit one thinking they won't be caught by the employers. This can be prevented only by having a strong reporting system to report unethical practices happening inside the organization. It is not easy for managers and HRs to have an eye around each and every employee in the organization. If the employees can report their concerns about their colleagues, employers will come to know the unethical practices more often than before. More essentially than having a system for employees to report the unethical behavior of a coworker, the employees should know how to use it in the ethics policy.
Having a platform like Trst Score also will be helpful to know and provide star ratings for the employees’ behavior and performance, also to report unethical practices. Since the platform reveals the true color of every employee, naturally anyone will be cautious and think twice before performing one.
Anti-Retaliation Policy
It is appreciated if you have a robust and well-communicated ethics reporting system in the company. But if the employees are afraid of retaliation from the company or the subject of their revelation, they will be reluctant to report the issue.
When you ask your employees to act ethically, they expect the same from the employer side too. As a part of that, the employer needs to provide confidence to employees to report asap whenever an unethical practice happens in the organization, and on behalf of raising an ethical concern, no one is going to punish them and you won’t tolerate employee-to-employee retaliation. It doesn’t matter how robust and well-communicated your ethics hotline is. If employees are afraid of retaliation from the company and/or the subject of their report, they won’t speak up as well.
The company’s ethics policy will guide employees through difficult situations and promote the company’s ethical values. No organization will grow without having a strong ethics policy in place to follow by the employees.